Josh,
[ignore previous truncated version]
I'm not quite sure what your angle is here, but I don't seem to be
communicating, (please correct me). If BTW you and/or others aren't
interested in this whole cultural history area, please ignore.
I'm saying the last 400 years have been framed by Descartes' and science's
mind VERSUS body dichotomy. That in turn has been expressed in a whole
variety of subsidiary dichotomoies and cultural battles:
HUMAN SYSTEM:
mind vs body
Self vs body
reason vs emotion
rationality vs imagination
intelligence vs creativity
(convergent vs divergent
intelligence intelligence)
logic vs analogy
intellect vs athleticism
SIGN SYSTEMS/ MEDIA
literacy vs artistic education
(symbolic vs image
media media )
(language, vs painting, photography, video etc)
maths
ORGANIZED KNOWLEDGE
cognitive psychology vs physical psychology
cognitive sciences physiological psychology
embodied cognition
sciences vs arts
(general particular,
abstract concrete)
[science vs religion]
philosophy vs naturalistic, science-based
"other-wordly," philosophy
thought-experimental
AI
Computational
AI/AGI vs robotics
(Symbolic AI vs (situated, embodied
evolutionary robotics)
What has been happening over the last decade or so, is that all these
dichotomies have been dissolving. It's arguably a consensus now that you
can't have reason without emotion, but the other dichotomies and battles are
still raging including throughout AI. Very soon now, I'm arguing, there will
be a consensus about all these things - and in every case, it will be
recognised that you can't have the left side, the pure, rational,
disembodied, symbolic side WITHOUT the right side, without the imaginative,
emotional, imagistic side - can't have mind without body - or AGI without a
robotic body.
You will have a corporate science and AI that sees them all as inseparable
sides of a whole. All this is happening now - dualism may have been
bankrupt a while ago, but Dennett has been, and still is, spending a massive
amount of energy arguing against it, because its influence is still playing
out, including in the current battles of AI..
What
Josh: On Friday 11 May 2007 03:06:52 pm Mike Tintner wrote:
... the mind/body era inaugurated by
Descartes (& the first scientific revolution) is coming to an end right
across our culture?
Dualism was intellectually bankrupt by 1950, with the spate of mechanized
logic results from Godel, Turing, Church, Kleene, etc, and Shannon's
information theory and Weiner & Rosenblueth's "Teleology" paper that was
one
of the foundations of cybernetics.
The illusion of pure, ethereal, rational mind, which
takes so many forms, is fast fading.
The scientific revolution was informed by the notion that the physical
world
was mechanistic and worked by laws that could be written down and
understood.
Descartes' dualism was a step TOWARD that from the earlier assumption that
both mind and body were moved by mystical "life forces." Dualism said that
only the mind was, the body was mechanistic.
The intellectual revolution of the 20th century merely dropped the other
shoe, saying that both mind and body are mechanistic. The revolution in
physical movers was back that-a-way -- somewhere in the Midlands they
should
be celebrating the 300th anniversary of the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution right about now.
It's been a while since putting a motor in a car earned it the
name "auto-mobile" -- nowadays we take for granted that it can move by
itself, and use "auto" to mean things that control themselves as well. The
era of mind -- mechanical rather than ethereal -- is just beginning.
Josh
-----
This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email
To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to:
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&;
--
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.467 / Virus Database: 269.6.8/797 - Release Date: 10/05/2007
17:10
-----
This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email
To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to:
http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
